Cloud-based Disaster Recovery Seen To Overtake Traditional Methods In 2018

Cloud computing continues to advance every aspect of businesses and one such popular application of it is for boosting the resilience of entire IT systems against disasters. This growth is worth noting as Gartner predicts that by 2018, the number of organizations using cloud-based disaster recovery or the Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) model will exceed the number of organizations using traditional recovery services.

There are many good reasons for companies to embrace DRaaS, but according to leading cloud services and data center firm IPC, the main motivation for this is how it can dramatically reduce downtime. This is crucial since employee productivity, consumer experience, and revenue, to name a few, are negatively affected whenever downtime halts operations.

“With traditional means, it can take more than 24 hours to bring up or recover servers, depending on the data. Also, since customary methods mostly require the use of physical hardware such as storage disks, you can’t discount the possibility that there might be nothing to recover as they can get damaged or lost during disasters,”explained IPC Chief Operating Officer, Dave de Leon.“With DRaaS, on the other hand, recovery can be done in a few minutes and it only requires an Internet connection.”

DRaaS is a model that takes advantage of cloud storage and backup services to ensure business continuity in the event of a disaster. Put simply, it involves creating an on-demand, cloud-based replica of the operational IT environment through virtualization, that can be initialized quickly and easily. When not used during disasters, the virtual infrastructure is synchronized for any changes, and tested periodically depending on the defined recovery point objective (RPO) — the maximum targeted period in which data might be lost due to incidents and disasters.

“The fact that the data backed up using DRaaS is cloud-based means that it is unlikely to be affected by the same disaster that affects a company’s main offices. It would be similar to having off-site, redundant backup servers in regions far away from the company’s location but costs much less,”said de Leon.

Instant recovery on demand

Cloud-based disaster recovery couldn’t have come at a better time with global downtime costs already skyrocketing. As reported in the latest global cost measurement study done by Information Technology Intelligence Consulting (ITIC), 81% of companies lost more than $300,000 (PHP15,600,000) due to downtime. Additionally, 98% of large enterprises with more than 1,000 employees said that an hour of downtime per year costs over $100,000 (PHP5,200,000), and 33% of companies indicate that they lost $1 million or more.

For IPC, these figures just show why companies should turn to the cloud for disaster recovery. With its virtualization ability, the entire server’s operating system, applications, patches, and data are encapsulated into a single software bundle or virtual server. This entire virtual server can be copied or backed up to an offsite data center and spun up on a virtual host in a matter of minutes. Additionally, the company notes that the move also frees businesses from the requirements needed to maintain a disaster recovery program, as DRaaS is offered by cloud service providers who will manage and operate the entire system.

“The need to minimize downtime and ensure faster recovery against disasters has become much more important, critical even, as technology is now considered vital for success,”notes de Leon.

As a local cloud computing pioneer, IPC, together with partner IPC CloudServers that is able to migrate itself every 15 minutes, and assures a recovery time of as little as two minutes after a disaster. Enhanced resiliency is also provided by IPC’s state-of-the-art data center, VITRO Data Center Parañaque. The facility features fully redundant services, designed to withstand calamities such as earthquakes and typhoons.

With CloudServers, customers are able to provision processing, storage, networks and other fundamental computing resources at one’s discretion, meaning CPU, RAM, storage, and bandwidth can be purchased independently to allow the best combination of cloud resources without the limitation of fixed sizes. Each resource is billed separately and transparently as either subscription or as pay-as-you-go, 5-minute billing segments enabling customers to track exactly how much their cloud servers are costing over time.

“Our fully integrated DRaaS solution dramatically reduces the cost of implementing disaster recovery across various systems and significantly improves recovery time compared to conventional or traditional disaster recovery approaches. The cloud is uniquely positioned to transform the resilience of IT systems.”Robert Jenkins, CloudSigma CEO & Co-founder.

“The need to minimize downtime and ensure faster recovery against disasters has become much more important, critical even, as technology is now considered vital for success,” said de Leon.

About IPC
IPC® (IP Converge Data Services, Inc.) is an Internet data center, telecommunications and cloud services company, providing local and regional enterprises with managed data services and business solutions at international standards. Certified with ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management Systems and ISO 27001:2013 Information Security Management Systems, the foundation of IPC’s business is customer satisfaction, ensured through high-quality on-time service delivery, best practices, and a personalized, “boutique” approach to clients. IPC is an ePLDT company. To know more about IPC, visit www.ipc.ph, like and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, and YouTube.

About CloudSigma
CloudSigma is a pure-cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider that’s enabling the digital industrial economy through its highly-available, flexible, enterprise-class hybrid cloud servers and cloud hosting solutions in Europe, the United States, Asia and Australia. CloudSigma is the most customizable cloud provider on the market, giving customers full control over their cloud and eliminating restrictions on how users deploy their computing resources. With CloudSigma, customers can provision processing, storage, networks and other fundamental computing resources as they please, as well as extend private networks out of existing infrastructure and elastically into CloudSigma’s IaaS cloud to create easy to manage and transparent hybrid cloud solutions. For more information, please visit CloudSigma.com, or find the company on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+.

About Ekaterina Palasheva

Ekaterina is a Marketing Expert at CloudSigma, pursuing a bachelor's degree in Business Administration at the University of Mannheim. Following her strong interest in technology and the business of technology she is currently contributing to the website content of Cloudsigma and supports all marketing campaigns, analysis and events.

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CloudSigma is 100% Swiss owned and based cloud service provider. We offer cloud locations in Europe, APAC and the United States. Our customers achieve complete control and flexibility over their cloud environments. Run any operating system unmodified (including Linux, Windows, FreeBSD and more). Craft your environment as you like with completely flexible server sizing, high availability, tiered storage, advanced networking and incredible performance.